Entry · catalog no. 4242
lily whites
/ /ˈlɪli ˌwaɪts/ /LIL-ee WYTES
noun · Harlem / jazz circuit · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Bed sheets.
“Sun coming up — time to hit the pad and pull the lily whites over my head.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem jive of the swing era, recorded in Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary inside a small domestic run of words: pad for bed, dreamers for blankets, nod for sleep. Like the rest of that lexicon it came from Black entertainers and the Black press before it reached print, and the confirmable text is the sixth edition, 1944. Keep it separate from the political adjective lily-white, meaning all-white and closed, which ran through American party politics from the 1880s onward. The two words look alike and have nothing to do with each other.
1938
First edition of the Hepster's Dictionary
1944
Sixth edition records lily whites for bed sheets
1950s
Swing jive fades from everyday speech
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem / jazz circuit · 1940s
Spoken by
Swing-era musicians and Harlem hipsters
$LILYWHThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
18/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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See also